Free Public Speaking Ebook:

If you're new to public speaking, you may not realize how trendy professional speaking advice can be. In the days of the Greeks, all the emphasis was on content and logic - these days it's all on presentation. Substance, or style? How about both. I'm happy to give you this free ebook download, Public Speaking: Principles and Practice by Irvah Lester Winter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Public Speaking instructor!

What follows is a sample from the Public Speaking ebook. To download it, look in the lefthand column over there <---

Public Speaking Tips From "Establishing the Tone"

The common trouble in using the voice for the more vigorous or intense
forms of speaking is a contraction or straining of the throat. This
impedes the free flow of voice, causing impaired tone, poor
enunciation, and unhealthy physical conditions.

So very common is
the "throaty" tone and so connected is throat pressure with every other
vocal imperfection, that the avoiding or the correcting of this one
fault demands constant watchfulness in all vigorous vocal work. The way
to avoid the faulty control of voice is, of course, to learn at the
proper time the general principles of what singers call voice
production.

These principles are few and, in a sense, are very simple,
but they are not easily made perfectly clear in writing, and a perfect
application of them, even in the simpler forms of speaking, often
requires persistent practice. It will be the aim here to state only
what the student is most likely to understand and profit by, and to
leave the rest to the personal guidance of a teacher.

Public Speaking Tips From "Vocal Flexibility"

The next step in the training is to try a more varied use of the voice,
without a loss of what has been acquired as to formation of tone. The
student is to make himself able to slide the voice up and down in
pitch, by what is called inflection, to raise or lower the pitch by
varied intervals, momentarily to enlarge or diminish the tone, in
expressive ways; in short, to adapt the improved tone, the more
effective method of voice control, to more varied speech. In the early
practice for getting tone variation, the student must guard most
carefully against "forcing."

As soon as can
be, the speech should be brought down to the utmost of simplicity and
naturalness, so that the thought of literature can be expressed with
reality and truth; can be made to sound exactly as if it came as an
unstudied, spontaneous expression of the student's own mind, and yet so
it can be heard, so it will be adequate, so it will be pleasing in
sound. The improved tone is to become the student's inevitable,
everyday voice.

Public Speaking Tips From "Making the Point"

When the student has made a fair degree of progress in the more
strictly mechanical features of speech, the formation of tone, and the
delivery of words, he is ready to give himself up more fully to the
effective expression of thought. Of first importance to the speaker, as
it is to the writer, is the way to make himself clear as to his
meaning.

The question has to be put again and again to the young
speaker, What is your point? What is the point in the sentence? What is
the point in some larger division of the speech? What is the point, or
purpose, of the speech as a whole? This point, or the meaning of what
is said, should be so put, should be so clear, that no effort is
required of a listener for readily apprehending and appreciating it.

Discussing now only the question of delivery, we say that the making of
a point depends mainly upon what we commonly call emphasis. Extending
the meaning of emphasis beyond the limit of mere stress, or weight, of
voice, we may define it as special distinctness or impressiveness of
effect.

In the case of a sentence there is often one place where the
meaning is chiefly concentrated; often the emphasis is laid sharply
upon two or more points or words in the sentence; sometimes it is put
increasingly on immediately succeeding words, called a climax, and
sometimes the stress of utterance seems to be almost equally
distributed through all the principal words of the sentence.

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